Posthumous book revives legacy of Glencoe author with cult following
One of Mike Shea’s favorite memories of his late father came from watching him write.
Robert Shea — the co-author of the popular series with a cult-following “Illuminatus!” and author of historical novels like “Shike” and “All Things Are Light” — drafted his works on typewriters before he purchased an early Apple IIe computer and backed up all his chapters on floppy disks, Mike recalled.
Once he completed a book, Shea would hand feed each page into a letter-quality printer over the course of two weeks to eventually produce a 10-inch stack of papers he could package and mail from his family’s home in Glencoe to his editor in New York.
“I asked him, ‘God, isn’t this killing you?’” Mike said of his father’s printing process. “He said ‘No, this is the best part. This is the part where I take all of this stuff that’s been sitting in a computer, that doesn’t exist anywhere, and now I’m making it real, I’m physically making it real.’”
Every Day Is A Good Day, by Robert Shea [book review at the Overweening Generalist Substack newsletter]
Blessed are the fanatical devotees of minor writers (hey, I’ve been here), for they ensure the unduly neglected don’t fall through the cracks and down the memory holes. Let us sing the praises of the intellectual free thinkers, the anonymous erudites, those toiling researchers who in their spare time seek out obscure periodicals, ephemera and texts, use archives, and remind the reading public: here was someone we ought not forget. Let us at least keep considering their work for now.
With Every Day Is A Good Day, writer Tom Jackson1 has done Robert Shea (1933-1994) this service and, hey: I thoroughly enjoyed being with Shea as I read this book. I like this man. Shea was an interesting thinker and writer and very complex. Unlike his friend Robert Anton Wilson, who quit Catholicism by age 14 if not earlier, Shea stayed to age 30, when he converted to his own thing: an amalgam of Zen, writing, and anarchism.
Book of works by Robert Shea edited by former Lawtonian Tom Jackson
GRAND JUNCTION, COLO. — Hilaritas Press has published the first new book in more than 30 years by Robert Shea, best known for co-writing “Illuminatus!”, the popular cult novel written with his friend, Robert Anton Wilson.
The book “Every Day is a GOOD Day,” a collection of Shea’s writings, is edited by Tom Jackson, a former Lawton resident and reporter for The Lawton Constitution who now lives in Ohio. Jackson has often written about Shea at his RAWIllumination.net website.
Shea was known for his historical novels such as “Shike” and “All Things Are Lights,” books that still draw rave reviews from readers at websites such as Goodreads, Jackson said. When Shea died in 1994, an obituary announced that a book would come out collecting his short pieces. That plan has finally been realized 30 years later with the publication of “Every Day Is a GOOD Day.”
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